The Exiled (3 page)

Cold air breathed up from the ice of the canal into her face as she walked. Anne shivered, though she and Ivan were moving briskly, her pattens clicking on the cobbles, he pacing beside her in good leather boots, matching his stride to hers.

Around them, houses crowded thick and tight, and warm light bloomed from some proud windows, though much of the town was dark. It was the wealthy who kept lights burning on into the night: the merchants, nobles and priests who crowded around the new Duke of Burgundy as his court formed, eager for advancement.

Sensible people went to bed even before the curfew bell, however, for heat and light were expensive in winter and it was easier, and cheaper, to stay warm under the covers. You didn’t need light in bed.

Nearly there now, nearly there. Anne could see Mathew’s house on the other side of the frozen canal just past the bridge. It was well lit for her homecoming and that was good: her toes were burning, tingling with the cold, pattens or no pattens to keep them out of the muck.

‘Mistress?’

Ivan had slowed his pace and spoke softly.

‘Hold the light, lady.’

He was always calm in a crisis, Ivan, for he’d survived far too many bloody turns to get excited, but even he, now, was tense, because ahead of them, blocking the narrow bridge across the canal that led to Sir Mathew’s house, was a compact group of silent men. Faint light from the stars caught the movement as they silently drew swords.

‘Behind me. Drop the light when I tell you.’ Ivan breathed the words and Anne slid quietly into his shadow.

‘Now!’

The flambeau’s light hissed out into the dirty, banked snow at the lane’s edge, but as it died, the flame showed Anne another three men behind them.

‘Ivan, behind us. Three more!’

‘The canal. Jump when I yell.’ It was the only choice and so, as he sprang towards the men on the bridge screaming, ‘A moi, Sainte George!’ Anne kicked off her pattens, scooped up her skirts and ran to the edge of the canal.

Too late to think, too late to judge the drop from bank to ice, she half fell, half dropped down, and though she rolled as soon as she hit the hard surface, to cushion the jolt, she knew she’d soon feel the shock in her muscles — if she survived.

Above her there were shouts from the bridge as Ivan fought his way into the midst of the attackers. The men had seen her drop and someone was yelling, ‘Get the girl, get the girl!’, but Anne still had an advantage of seconds, though she was encumbered by long skirts.

Breathing raggedly, heart jolting, she scrabbled to her feet and blessed the lessons of moving over the ice that Ivan had made her practise this winter — one foot, next foot, striving for balance. Then fear turned to panicked acid in her throat: she had to cross the fragile, new ice in the centre of the canal if she was to reach Sir Mathew’s frozen water gate ahead of her attackers. On the bridge, Ivan was fighting with the fury of his berserk ancestors, but he could not, single-handedly, hold them all away from her. She must do it, must move on.

With a yell, two men dropped down off the centre of the bridge, but the freeze was only two days old and the ice was not as thick as it soon would be. Their yells changed to screams as they fell through into the frigid black waters of the Zwijn.

Anne saw the cracks in the ice shoot out from the hole they’d made as she slid on towards the farther side of the canal, but she was far enough away from them, and so much lighter, that the ice held together under her soft shoes. Breathing hard, she reached the other bank and scrambled towards Sir Mathew’s water gate — it was frozen shut but it was close, closer. Perhaps she could climb it.

Now she was yelling, too, ‘Help us, help us!’ as lights flared in houses above the canal. No one liked another’s dispute, especially if it was just a fight amongst drunken mercenaries, but they had heard her calling out and a woman’s voice stirred the conscience — a little.

Blessedly, torchlight suddenly shone down and willing hands reached out to haul her up — Sir Mathew’s steward, Maxim, and two of the stable boys. ‘Help Ivan! There, the bridge,’ she could hardly gasp the words as her arms were wrenched above her head, but then they had her onto the roadway and Maxim was hurrying her inside, into the warm hall, whilst he shouted for more men.

It was over very soon. Maxim and Sir Mathew’s servants rushed the bridge where Ivan was viciously defending the honour of his master’s house. Two assailants, lethally slashed, were groaning at his feet and one man was dead, his blood a black, steaming puddle in the snow. Of the two who had jumped from the bridge, one was lying on the cracked ice half drowned and gasping, whilst the other hadn’t surfaced. The other men, the followers, had disappeared.

Now Anne stood in front of the expensive new fireplace in Sir Mathew’s hall-house under a painted panel of Saint George destroying the dragon; it was an apt expression of her life: she must slay the dragon of fear here, tonight. Holding out her hands to the flames, she swallowed hard, trying to control her breathing, trying to banish the burning vomit in her throat.

It was a shock. All she had been warned about was true. And if this was more than it seemed — a kidnap for ransom — then she had enemies and it was time to face these facts, time to think her way through her situation very carefully.

‘Mistress? Are you harmed?’ It was her foster-mother’s anguished voice Anne heard now and she turned slowly, giving herself enough time to gather a smile to her face.

‘Not at all, Deborah. As you see. Where’s Edward?’ She must not give in to the fear; must not. Shakily she forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply as she tried to unfasten her cloak with suddenly useless fingers.

Deborah answered the unasked question. ‘He’s fine. Just fine. Here. Let me.’ Deborah hurried to help, gently detaching the cloak from Anne’s shoulders and unpinning the crushed and distorted headdress. ‘He’s asleep, bless him. We’ve got his cradle near the fire in the kitchen. He fed well again tonight — I’m very pleased with the new nurse; she’s a fine strong girl, abundant milk.’

Routine. Reassuring, safe routine. All was well — Deborah could always do that for her. Anne summoned another smile and carefully smoothed the folds of her expensive red dress. She grimaced. It would never be the same. The hem was dragged and dirty and there were dark, wet patches where she’d fallen on her knees; it would have to be carefully dried and brushed if the fabric was not to be completely ruined. Hans Memlinc would see her in another dress tomorrow.

‘I shall see how my nephew fares.’ She needed to see the baby, needed to hold him. Deborah smiled at her, touched her hand gently. ‘Yes, it’s nice and cosy in the kitchen. I’ll see to warming the solar.’

Anne was calmer now, soothed as always by Deborah’s care of her. Tremulously the girl smiled in return and would have leant against her foster-mother for strength, except that Maxim or one of the other servants might see the moment of weakness and be curious.

She was too new to Brugge, too new to the role she’d been given — that of Mathew Cuttifer’s ward — to be anything but careful; too much was at stake. She and Deborah must always retain the appearance of servant and mistress in front of the household, yet both women found the constant role-playing a strain, especially now. They’d get used to it, they had to. For the moment, it was their only safety for they had nowhere else to go.

Anne sighed, then consciously relaxing her rigid shoulders, folded her hands at her waist and stepped down the wooden staircase to the kitchens without fuss, breathing deeply as the peace of being home and safe clothed her softly as a cloak.

The kitchen was always busy in a large household, especially now as it was close to supper-time, but as Anne appeared, all work stopped. She was well liked, their master’s ward.

‘Lady, are you harmed?’ The Flemish cook, Maitre Flaireau, hurried forward. ‘Please, please, sit here by the warmth.’

Anne nodded brightly in return for the relieved smiles from Ralph, the filthy scullion, Henri, the spit boy, and Herve, the Maitre’s meat-man as she allowed herself to be led to the ingle-seat beside the largest of the cooking fires. She must not let them know how strange she still felt or let them see how hard it was to keep her tightly clasped hands from shaking. She had one aim now.

‘Is Edward ... where is he?’ As Maitre Flaireau pressed her to sit. ‘There, mistress, do you see?’

They had moved his cradle into the shadows, out of the light of the cooking fires into a warm corner of the cheerful, tiled room. And he slept on, oblivious to all the bustle around him in the busy kitchen.

Anne yearned to pick him up, to kiss him awake, to hug him tightly to her breasts — the breasts which had never fed this child, but she restrained herself. Time for that later, when she was alone again with Deborah, the baby safely in the little annex of her solar.

‘Wine! Hot wine for our mistress. Herve, hurry now!’ Anne smiled slightly at the courtesy title ‘Mistress’. Lady Margaret Cuttifer, Mathew’s wife, was mistress in this house, even though she was so rarely here.

Four months since Edward’s birth, four months of lies. She sipped the hot, rich wine; they’d spiced it with honey and nutmeg and beaten an egg yolk into it for strength. She was tired now, and aching. Leaning into the ingle-seat, she closed her eyes, just closed them and ...

‘Sssh! Herve, move quietly!’ The cook hissed at his assistant as he pantomimed creeping silently around the girl who seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep. Chastened, Herve took care to sharpen the wicked boning knife as quietly as he could. He would be mortified to wake her, poor lady.

But Anne was not asleep. She smelled the blood again; it was animal blood from the carcass Herve was butchering, but it was enough, she was back there ...

His birth, Edward’s birth. Four months ago and a long, long way from Brugge. A tiny, suffocatingly hot room in the convent she’d been sent to by Sir Mathew to await the labour well away from prying eyes, away from gossip.

Blood. Blood everywhere. On the straw-stuffed mattress, the whitewashed wall beside the bed, all over her. But he’d been born, alive and strong. Deborah had taken him from her belly and given him to a woman who’d been hired to suckle him, immediately, not even wiping the wax and the blood off his little body.

It was best this way, said Deborah, best that Anne never suckled him for if she did, to give him to another would be unbearable. It would be easier with time. These words were muttered as a prayer by her foster-mother as she bound Anne’s breasts with bruised arnica and mallow to help with the pain when her milk let down, the milk that would not be given to her child.

And now she and the Cuttifers called the baby her sister’s son. Her dear dead sister, Aveline.

Anne frowned in the strange half sleep as the light from the fire flickered on her face, her eyelids. Aveline ... her name was a breath, not even a sound. For Aveline was indeed dead, and she too had borne a child named Edward. Yet she was never a sister of Anne’s, although, in the end, in that other life lived as the Cuttifers’ servant in London, Anne had loved her like one.

Aveline, who’d served in the Cuttifer household as Lady Margaret’s maid; Aveline, raped and made pregnant by Piers, Mathew Cuttifer’s only son; Aveline, who’d endured a forced and dreadful marriage to Piers Cuttifer, finally killing both her repellent husband, then herself and leaving her own child an orphan to be raised by his grandparents, Sir Mathew and Lady Margaret.

The tears were genuine when Anne spoke of the sadness of Aveline’s life and death, and perhaps it was easier to believe, for others, that Anne’s baby was Aveline’s son for he was not much like his ‘aunt’; his skin was olive and he had speedwell-blue eyes, his father’s eyes in truth, where her own were some strange amalgam of green and blue. Jewels, he’d called them, sea-topaz, kingfisher bright.

Anne remembered too well every word they’d spoken, every moment they’d ever had together. But it was useless to dream. Dreaming would not bring Edward’s father to Brugge and she had her own way to make in life without him — an aching, lonely thought.

But then Anne’s courage rose a little as she dismissed the image of her lover’s face. She had much, so much, to be thankful for in comparison to many others. She’d been left a small estate in Somerset, gifted to her mother Alyce de Bohun, and that provided a small income faithfully accounted to her each quarter day. She had good, warm clothes, a house to live in — even if it was not hers — and a small number of jewels, if all else failed her: a topaz brooch, a great ruby ring (a precious keepsake given her by Edward’s father) and the little pearl and garnet cross presented to her by the Cuttifers when she’d left their house for the Court of Edward IV and his queen, Elisabeth Wydeville.

Anne shifted uneasily in her chair, frowning as, unbidden, the images came; pictures from that time as Elisabeth Wydeville’s body servant when dread and joy were her constant companions.

For it was at court she’d fallen in love with Edward the king, and it was at court she’d found out who she really was: the natural daughter of the old king, Henry VI. Thus the man she loved, adulterously, had usurped her father’s throne.

That knowledge had brought fear, and sudden clarity. Yes, Anne was illegitimate,
but
she was the illegitimate daughter of a king. Sighing, almost groaning, Anne shook her head. It hurt, it still hurt like a deep, deep burn, the choice she’d made: self-exile to Brugge rather than remain in England. For if she’d stayed, she’d have to have chosen a side, eventually, as the old king’s daughter.

A terrible choice, for how could she support her father’s natural enemy, the man who’d taken his throne, driven him into hiding, even
if
she loved him?

But then, she’d not known she was pregnant when she’d sailed from Dover into exile. Perhaps Edward might have wanted her to stay if she could have told him, even with the risk to his throne? He’d only had daughters with Elisabeth Wydeville, the queen — but she, Anne, had a son. England desperately needed a male heir if Edward was to consolidate his reign. Perhaps he’d have forgiven Anne her ancestry for the sake of their child — this combination of York and Lancaster?